Hasta La Ideas

Remember back around this time in 2009 how bummed Frank Gehry seemed to be about turning 80? Granted, that’s right as the architecture industry was struggling through one of its worst periods in decades, and in turn wasn’t treating the starchitect too well at all either. Between canceled projects and mass layoffs, it likely would have been a rough patch for most anyone. But what a different a couple of years makes, huh? The good people at Curbed have info on and a handful of photos from Gehry’s 82nd birthday bash. Held at the top of the Manhattan building baring his name, the Nicolai Ouroussoff-melting New York by Gehry, the guests included Bono and Ali Hewson, director Mike Nichols, artist Chuck Close, fellow starchitect Robert A.M. Stern, and many others. And in at least half the photos, he’s even offering up a big smile. So bravo for happier days and here’s to many more.

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Hey Mayor Bloomberg, doesn’t “Tim Brown Day” have a nice ring to it? The IDEO president and CEO (pictured) is in New York today to accept the first annual Havemeyer Award, an honor established by the local chapter of the American Society of Interior Designers’ Education Legacy Fund (ELF) in honor of Metropolis founder and publisher Horace Havemeyer III. At the direction of Havemeyer, the award will recognize “a major contributor to the global conversation about design and its growing importance.” First up is Mr. Design Thinking himself—Brown—who receives the award from its namesake tonight at “State of Design,” an event sponsored by ELF and Metropolis. Brown will chat with MASS Design Group cofounder Michael Murphy and Metropolis editor-in-chief Susan Szenasy about what shapes twenty-first century design and how designers respond to our evolving culture.

In other IDEO-related event news, Bill Moggridge, co-founder of the global design firm and now director of the Smithsonian’s Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, will sit down with YouTube co-founder Chad Hurley to discuss the role of the revolutionary video sharing platform within the changing world of mainstream media (see also: Moggridge’s new book, Designing Media). And fear not, non-New Yorkers, the museum has announced that this installment of “Bill Design’s Talks” will be webcast. Tune in here at 6:30 p.m. on Thursday, March 24, to watch the event live. But be careful: watching an online video about the role of online video may make your brain explode.

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Just a few short years ago, the design world was thrilled to hear that MIT tech guru, John Maeda, was going to be taking the helm at the Rhode Island School of Design. However, shortly after taking control, the trouble began. Between Hope Alwang‘s high-profile quick and mysterious exit and a variety of missteps along the way, Maeda’s management came to be something of an ongoing battle, culminating in last week’s faculty vote of no confidence of their still relatively-new president. While both the school and Maeda himself are now attempting to repair the damage, reporting on all the good things he’s done in his tenure, design writer, educator, and one-time critic at RISD, Natalia Ilyin, has filed this great read on her personal blog, telling the other side of the story. While she places much of the blame on Maeda’s head, she also makes note that the school itself is to blame, believing that bringing in a well-known innovator would make them more cutting edge and improve their abilities to teach in new ways. In the end, to paraphrase, everyone failed. Here’s a section of her essay, painting particularly negative portrait of the school’s now-struggling president:

Maeda’s made so many enemies and done so many wrong-headed things in such a short amount of time that I am reminded once again that IQ and intelligence are not the same thing. He’s made many sweeping administrative errors, but it is this that bothers me: he thinks himself more intelligent than those who surround him and those who have gone before him. And since he believes himself more intelligent and advanced than the people that went before him, he assumes that what they believed is not true anymore, is outdated. This is a false syllogism.

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Courtesy Stephen Kling

Between 2003 and 2010, Stephen Kling (at left) created hundreds of covers for The Nation, the left-of-center weekly helmed by Katrina vanden Heuvel. On Wednesday or Thursday of any given week, he would be given a cover story, usually a sprawling ideas piece slugged “Headline TK.” His mission? To translate the story, whether a prescription for dealing with mendacious chief executives or an exposé on resurgent nationalism in Iraq, into a provacative-but-not-too-provocative visual—by Friday. He succeeded by thinking (and working) fast and drawing upon his arsenal of textures, flags, hands, drips, and smears. When stock photo libraries came up short, he grabbed his digital camera and got shooting.

Klinger recently created a website that displays highlights of his Nation covers and the stories behind them. A special section is devoted to cover designs that didn’t make the cut (Sarah Palin as a sled dog, a drop of blood on a Wall Streeter’s wingtip), but when we asked him to name his favorite Nation creation, he pointed not to a cover but to the Christmas card he created for the magazine in 2006. “It just happened one day, entirely unplanned, as I was goofing around with some hokey old photos—George W. Bush was in a dirndl, in Dick Cheney‘s arms,” Klinger told us. “I showed it to the circulation director of The Nation, who immediately decided to scrap the usual Christmas subscription premium and use it instead.” These days, between designing publications for pharmaceutical companies and pitching other magazines, Klinger is writing and filming a documentary about art direction. He’s also taking steps to avoid digital overload. “I’m rediscovering old-fashioned analog photography in my new darkroom.”

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In case you missed it this week, there was quite a bit of buzz this week about the future of Kanye West‘s fashion education. Despite being already well-known for his occasionally trend-setting clothing choices, palling around with designers, and had a successful internship at Gap (we assume), The Sun broke the story earlier this week that West was preparing to enter the masters-level fashion design program at Central Saint Martins College of Art and Design in London. While the school is the alma mater of a number of industry giants, including Alexander McQueen, Zac Posen and less-than-giant-at-the-moment, John Galliano, it also has celebrity legacy in other fields as well, having included people like Jarvis Cocker, Colin Firth, and Pierce Brosnan as students at one time, to name just a very few (though not all, of course, were enrolled in fashion). So maybe West would have no trouble moving right into a program. The only trick is that he might not actually be going at all. MTV News called the college and was told that “Kanye West is not enrolling in the MA Fashion program.” Furthermore, they said, “He visited the college last week on unrelated matters.” So will the musician be noticeably absent over the next year or two as he digs in, spending hours buried under books and fabric? Somehow we doubt that, but who’s to know when it comes to Kanye. Maybe he’s just reading the writing on the wall and realizing that the future of celebrity follows the James Franco model and every person in the public eye must now be enrolled in at least 15 different programs at one time in order to stay relevant.

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